Actually, if you look at the bigger picture, you have a much larger problem... why would you select from 3 different tables into 1? Except, possibly, for reporting, you...

I guess that depends on what you're calling a "parameter"...

Mike, going back to your original post, the...

Perfect... thanks, Matt.

Not real sure where you're coming up with that... I agree that SELECT/INTO will hold a lock...

I was pleasantly surprised a few years back to see MS trot out an actual certification specifically for these folks with most of its emphasis on the SQL side, and...

For so many reasons, storing dates as formatted VARCHARs is such a terrible idea. If you need to do any date math or comparison of dates, formatted dates only...

Actually, here's a solution that doesn't use a temp table...

--===== Solve the problem ==========================

--===== Declare a variable to hold the delimiter

DECLARE @Delim CHAR(1)

SET @Delim = ','

...

Oh no... a "sequence" table. :hehe: Third party app we got used one... cause an average of 640 deadlocks per day because of the way they wrote the increment...

Thanks for the feedback, Taffy.

Jeff, your "auto magic" one came the closest but I got some extra zeros I haven't quite figured yet -

Original Modified

-------------------

A14 A00014

B2 B0002

OBT 0000OBT

YH3 YH0003

XX 0000XX

So - too many...

Karthik, it looks as if your code will fail if the length of any part changes because you've hard-coded each length. Also, I wouldn't use the spt_Values table in...

Ummm.... I'm pretty sure I'll avoid recursive CTE's just like I avoid Cursors... they're just too...

Yep... know that... see my post above...

Heh... dunno... must be a new "feature" than MS built in... 😉

Heh... yeah... it's a shame that MS can't figure out the best of both worlds. Having just seen 2k5 for the first time and the apparent mess they made...